Beware of Words

Do single words matter?

An artist and a software developer have teased out the frequencies and infrequencies of single words in the King James Bible by rearranging the entire book in alphabetical order.

If you think single words matter, reviewing the data from the alphabetized King James Bible—or BIBLE THE as they’ve titled it—could have an impact on your sense of the “Good Book”:

Data suggests that the Bible skews towards a positive bias. For example, ‘good’ is used 720 times, ‘bad’ only 18. ‘Love’ is used 308 times and ‘hate’ 87 times. And ‘happy’ less so, at 28 times, but still over twice as much as the 11 uses of ‘sad’.

‘Right’ features 358 times, ‘wrong’ just 26. ‘Light’ features 272 times, ‘dark’ only 43. ‘Pleasure’ 61 times, ‘pain’ 25.

And ‘life’ 451 times, still more than the 371 instances of ‘death’. This positive trait also translates into Biblical subject matter. For example, ‘heaven’ features 582 times, whereas ‘hell’ only 54. There are 94 ‘angels’ to 55 ‘devils’, 96 ‘saints’ to 48 ‘sinners’, and 302 ‘blessed’ to a mere 3 ‘damned’, and a total of 27 ‘miracles’.

On the other hand, there are 1,394 instances of ’no’, whilst the word ‘yes’ only appears 4 times in the entire Bible. There are 269 “enemies” to 49 “friends”, 8 ‘liars’ and 51 ‘lies’. 150 ‘heathens’, 63 ‘judged’, and 26 ‘guilty’, with 37 ‘crucified’, 30 ‘hanged’, and 71 ‘defiled’. 

Unsurprisingly, there is no ‘sex’ or ‘intercourse’ in the Bible, but there are 17 ‘concubines’, 9 ‘adulterers’, 8 ‘harlots’, 4 ‘sodomites’, 3 instances of ‘copulation’, 3 instances of ‘conception”, 2 ‘whores’, and 1 ‘prostitute’.

Socio-economically, there are twice as many ‘givers’ as ‘takers’ – 93 ‘poor’ and 81 ‘rich’, 77 ‘rulers’, 237 ‘prophets’, 30 ‘nobles’, 480 ‘servants’, 400 ‘priests’, 30 ‘soldiers’, 17 ‘publicans’, 27 ‘workers’, 5 ‘lawyers’, 9 ‘carpenters’, 1 ‘fishermen’, 6 ‘lepers’, 3 ‘beggars’, and 1 ‘slave’.

In terms of diversity, ‘white’ dominates by about 4:1, featuring 75 times, with ‘black’ just 18 times. But the Bible does appear to feature a diverse cast: 256 ‘Jews’, 254 ‘Philistines’, 98 ‘Egyptians’, 61 ‘Syrians’, 14 ‘Greeks’, 10 ‘Cushi’ (North Africans), 10 ‘Assyrians’, 7 ‘Romans’, 7 ‘Samaritans’, 5 ‘Persians’, 4 ‘Babylonians’, 2 ‘Libyans’, 2 ‘Christians’, a single ‘Arab’, and an equal amount of ‘believers’ and ‘infidels’.

Gender-wise, the data suggests that the Bible is overwhelmingly biased towards males. At its most extreme, the Bible has 8,472 instances of the word ‘his’ and only a mere 3 instances of ‘hers’.  And while this gender bias persists across the male–female divide, for the most part it is less pronounced. There are 1,653 references to ‘men’ and only 181 to ‘women’. ‘He’ is used 10,404 times, ‘she’ only 982. ‘Him’ 6,659 times to 1,994 uses of ‘her’. This bias extends beyond pronouns, to other gender specific identifiers: only 252 ‘daughters’ to 1,094 ‘sons’, only 8 ‘mothers’ to 548 ‘fathers’, only 4 uses of the term ‘lady’ to 7,830 uses of the term ‘lord’, 3 ‘queens’ to 340 ‘kings’, and just 5 uses of ‘goddess’ to 4,440 uses of ‘god’. (collater.al/en/bible-the-sideline-collective-book-design)

It is important to acknowledge that most people believe the Bible was written by men almost 2,000 years ago, with the translation into what we know as the King James Version happening a millennia after that. Although the biases of the writers, scribes, and translators are most likely unconscious and cultural, their words speak for themselves. So does the data.*

What prompted me to share this information was the power of single words to create propaganda, to describe values, and to create ideological foundations.

Words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are signals, maps, and guideposts that have both a subtle and bold imprint on how we think, feel, and act. Words have power even when there is no context or stream of words that suggest meaning. Beware of words.

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*And both need contextualization as, for instance, simply counting ‘no’s against the positive bias does not account for usage such as “no more pain,” “no more sorrow,” “no more tears.” This only undergirds the point, however, of the power and potential danger of single words…